The Brave

It’s The Brave (from Israeli producer Avi Nir, who shepherded “Homeland” to American TV) that busts in with the smoothest operation skills [of the new military dramas], as Anne Heche plays a hard-driven intelligence agency head who gives orders to a tightknit (and ethnically diverse) special-ops team.

The Brave’s patriotism and its approach to dealing with threats to Americans is cathartic. Plausible? You’ll have to find another series for that.

The Brave is refreshingly free of obligatory domestic baggage. Its thrills are generic, but at least it stays focused on the mission.

The Brave, which is as generic as broadcast network pilots get, feels like it’s a latecomer to the wave of post-“Homeland” dramas that were commissioned a few years ago. There’s no sophistication in the treatment of geopolitics or the wars in the Middle East, its characters are bland, and even the action sequences have nothing special to set them apart.

The series follows the template for action shows but makes the most of it through crisp pacing and realistic action sequences.

The opening hour ends with an unexpected, big boom of a cliffhanger designed to bring viewers back for more. In that it’s unique. Otherwise The Brave is broad-stroked and pro forma in highly volatile times both at home and abroad.

Clearly, the life-and-death world of military operations was an appealing concept this fall, but there has to be more than a premise to back it up. In The Brave, there's just not quite enough.